Welcome to my Oz page. My name is Scott.

To find out more about me, you can check out my homepage or you
can finger me by clicking on my face below.

My research interests:

My main reasearch interests are in creating emotional and social
characters for interactive drama. Actually, that's not quite true.
What I'm really doing is creating tools and defining procedures so
that real artists can create such characters.

In order to create artistically effective, interactive characters (or
believable agents, I have taken lessons from other arts as a
starting point. Most traditional AI research has focused on either
creating competent/intelligent agents or agents that are cognitively
plausible models of humans. The goal of creating good interactive
characters is different from either of these goals and requires a
different approach (though I have used ideas from these other research
areas).

My goal to aid in the creation of emotional agents draws heavily on other
emotion research. Just to drop a few names: Ortony, Clore, and
Collins; Sloman (Aaron heads the
Cognition and Affect project at the University of Birmingham);
Frijda; Oatley. My work is somewhat different,
though, in that I am willing to pass up cognitive plausibility to
achieve characters that simply appear emotional. I have designed an
architecture, called Em, that allows artists to create a wide variety of
emotional characters. Em is both more powerful and easier to use because
it has been tightly integrated into a broad agent architecture.

To help artists create believable social agents, I have designed a
two-part methodology that help artists create personality-rich social
behaviors for believable agents. The first part of the methodology
suggests a number of important elements of personality that should be
incorporated into social behaviors and some heuristics for doing so.
The second part of the methodology suggests that artists create
behaviors that rely on minimal amounts of modeling of other agents in
the environment. Using this methodology I have been able to create
a number of social behaviors that are robust and personality-rich.

For more on my efforts to create social and emotional agents, check out
my thesis, "Believable Social and
Emotional Agents" in postscript and
gzipped postscript.

I also spend some time hanging out with the members of the
Prodigy
project. Prodigy is a planning system that acts as a testbed for
research in machine learning. My main research effort involving
Prodigy was a joint effort with Jim Blythe to
combine the behavior-based Hap architecture used in Oz agents with the
deliberative Prodigy system. Our results are recorded for all to see
in a very nice
tech report.

For (vaguely research-related) fun, I have also dabbled a bit with
using genetic algorithms to interactively create
art and I maintain the interactive
fiction page.